She shrugged. It was the worst shrug she had ever done. Even Penny, lying in the doorway with her chin on her paws, seemed to see right through it.
"It's just really good work," Josie said.
"Yeah," said Boone. "It is."
He paid her. Forty dollars this time, and he said forty was the rate for a Saturday morning and he didn't want to argue about it. Then, while she was putting it in her pocket, he said, without looking at her, "You get a mind to learn more of it, I got about four other things around here that don't run. I could use somebody with small hands."
He held up his right hand. The two outside fingers curled down toward the palm, the knuckles swollen and shiny. He tried to straighten them, and they wouldn't go.
"Dupuytren's," he said. "Fancy name. Means my hands are turning into claws. They can cut it, and I had it cut once, and it come right back. Plus arthritis. I can still twist a throttle. Can't feel a feeler gauge worth a damn. Can't get a nut started in a tight spot. Dropped a points screw into a crankcase in a customer's bike two years ago, had to split the cases to get it out, ate the whole cost." He put the hand back in his pocket. "That's what that calendar is. That's when I closed up."
Josie looked at the calendar. October 2018. A photo of a red Sportster on a mountain road.
"I could come on Saturdays," she said slowly. "Maybe. In the morning."
"Saturdays, then."
Her watch beeped. Twelve noon. She looked at it and slapped the button to stop it, and said, "I have to go," and was halfway to the door before she realized she'd said it like a fire alarm.
"Something on fire?"
"I have to give my grandpa his medicine."
She said it before she thought. It just came out, plain, the way true things did when you were tired. Boone stood in the dim shop with the light coming in behind her through the doorway, and she saw him take it in, the steel man's watch on a skinny wrist, the noon alarm.